I’m glad you think so – it’s only taken about fifteen years.
Hmmm. I think you’d have a hard time convincing the average human brain not to see it as a hierarchy! We are already primed to see such arrangements as having precedence, going from left to right (if you are a Westerner) and I would fully expect such interpretations to be pre-conscious. But cognitive psychology is not my field, so I won’t go on.
However, I think I have finally worked out what Agents are for – which is to do precisely what you mention, and pull out only a selection of the notes. I had been wedded to the idea that you put things in boxes permanently (in hierarchies) and opened a box having previously opened the box that contained it. But it is much more useful to have boxes that alter themselves to contain only the things you want. So I suppose I’m saying that, at this point, it seems much less useful to sit and choose where to put things in Outline view than it is to create Agents that will find stuff, thereby creating “targeted” boxes. The original position in the container is no longer of such importance to me. This is something of a relief – I don’t like making decisions, and deciding which box to put things in was taking up too much time and energy!